Abstract: In recent years, climate change has become a topic of heated
discussion, and sea ice has been one of the components of climate
receiving considerable attention. This was not at all the situation in
the 1970s, when Claire Parkinson got into
sea ice studies. Claire will share some of the sea-ice science she has
been involved in at Goddard over the past 34 years, as well as key
moments on her route to becoming a NASA scientist and key factors
influencing her perspective on climate change and the
discussion of climate change. These factors include an early passion
for mathematics, a keen interest in the history of science, a career in
sea ice studies, and concerns about geoengineering.

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

A physical scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Dr. Mian Chin is the lead of several projects involving global modeling of tropospheric aerosols
and chemistry. In the series of Maniac Talks we’ve had so far, Mian’s talk
provides an important linkage between the observations and modeling world. So
far we’ve had 9 talks and they focused on the use of satellite and in-situ
observations for earth sciences. Mian and her colleagues have developed the
global GOCART model (Goddard
Chemistry Aerosol Radiation and Transport), which has been used to simulate
tropospheric aerosols and related gas species. The GOCART model is suitable for
linking satellite and in-situ or satellite-based observations.

In
her talk, Mian shared her personal experiences in this field and discussed
recent progresses, issues, and perspectives. She did a wonderful job of
charting out the development in the modeling of global aerosols that began about 20 years ago. For someone who is not an expert in aerosol modeling,
the historical background was a perfect course on when things started, who were
the key researchers, what were the key results, what followed from this initial
work and where the field is now – including the key groups currently working on
various aspects of aerosol modeling. Mian mentioned that now there are many
global models in the world developed with various complexities and
capabilities. She presented important results and contributions from her group
and collaborators in terms of modeling dust, black carbon, organic carbon and
sea salt using GOCART model. Comparisons of model results against satellite
observations were also presented. Mian’s talk illustrated the wide range of
applications of global models, including assessing aerosol climate forcing and
impacts on the past, present, and future, forecasting near-real time air
quality, supporting field experiments, and analyzing observations from a
variety of platforms.